I like the response below. I've felt that the phrase "emergent behavior" has been overused for quite some time now. In the early days of running TRANSIMS (a large-scale traffic simulator) we often found ourselves saying "I didn't expect that behavior" upon seeing an unexpected series of traffic flow patterns 'emerge' in simulations of a city with 8.6 million people driving around over a 24 hour period. Indeed, often times some of the results were unexpected, however once analyzed they always made perfect sense.
--Doug -- Doug Roberts, RTI International [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] 505-455-7333 - Office 505-670-8195 - Cell On 6/18/07, Günther Greindl <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Hello Russell, > "Sum of the parts" is more metaphoric than literal. IMHO, the key to > the kingdom is emergence, and nonlinearity is only necessary to I used to throw around the word "emergence" around until I noticed that I used it there where I did not understand what was really going on, like in: "consciousness? - simple - an emergent process" Since then I have stopped using the word - it is, in fact, vacuous to call something emergent - whereas ie. nonlinear has definite meaning. The problem is that emergence seems to be the opposite of a mechanistic or an algorithmic process; or an analytical one. So it becomes a stop-gap concept for all processes which elude our common problem solution techniques. But no new explanation is obtained when one calls a process emergent - on gets instead a false sense of security, of having grasped something which in reality still eludes our understanding. Best Regards, Günther -- Günther Greindl Department of Philosophy of Science University of Vienna [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.univie.ac.at/Wissenschaftstheorie/ Blog: http://dao.complexitystudies.org/ Site: http://www.complexitystudies.org ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
